Tectonics Glasgow 2019 Report

tectonics is one of those strangely liminal festivals, always between and around, neither one thing nor another. sliding drily between boundaries, rubbing fingertips round porous edges, teasing those permeable holes where sound / noise / composition leak and fragment and fracture. where, (if performance peaks (in all senses of the word)) we either atomise or liquefy.

often about the where as much as the what, involving the space itself, whether as playground, casino, junkshop or lecture hall. where performers scatter across a room, and music rattles around like pennies sucked up a hoover. with sound on separate levels, separate cues, separate focus, separate scales, patterns set to disorient as much as define. or die trying anyway.

where disconnection’s as important as connection, exclusion as inclusion, resonance as silence, construction as deconstruction, order as disorder. nothing really fits. each note / piece / performance a satellite round the another, aiming (or hoping) for alignment.

with all this constant shift and disruption it’s difficult to find a footing, to balance. and sometimes you drown in complexity, sometimes you sink in simplicity, sometimes you dissolve in the inscrutable.

familiarity breeds contempt. disorder triggers anxiety. each performance a dance, a nervy funk or funky nerve, at once agitated and agitating, creeping with restless tension. it’s a gentle kind of confrontation.

what i’m saying is, i dig when things aren’t the things they’re supposed to be. where sound is instrument or vice versa, where image does not capture or represent, where medium and message are divorced and communicating through passive aggressive notes and cheap lawyers.